The opening gesture of Nina Simone: Four Women is almost worth the price of admission. Beneath a mosaic glass portrait of Nina Simone, Shontina Vernon, playing the legend herself, sings the Gershwins’ “I Loves You, Porgy,” pointedly dropping the “s” in “loves.” For Simone, the “s” is a parody of black vernacular, a way of increasing sympathy at the expense of black Americans as a whole, and she refuses to participate in the stereotype.
The sound of breaking glass shatters the melancholy piano, and a video of police spraying black marchers with fire hoses flashes across a screen. The curtain opens, and Jennifer Zeyl’s incredible set is revealed. She’s re-created the bombed-out 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, where Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Denise McNair were killed by the Ku Klux Klan in 1963.
